Smart Lazy

Saturday, January 7th 2012

There’s a lot of different types of laziness in this world. Not all of them have names. But there’s two types you should definitely be aware of if you are smart and work under someone you feel is not so smart.

To a manager (the bad kind who just wants a fungible cog in a machine), laziness is the worst. Fire him! Get rid of him! He’s lazy! He’s good for nothing! He told me himself he was lazy.

To an engineer, or anybody who is very smart, a certain kind of laziness people often refer to as “smart lazy” is definitely a good thing.

The lazy software developer will automate a boring or error prone process. A lazy engineer would rather take a walk, thinking about a problem for a few hours and then implement the solution in just a few minutes than to spend countless hours banging their head on the desk.

The worst thing a software developer or engineer can do is tell their (lazy) non-technical managers “I’m lazy” and then actually show pride in your statement. It will never do your career at the company any favours.